Does Google Sitemap help?

Does Google Sitemap help? Before I created and submit  Google Sitemaps for my websites, I asked the same question to myself. And I also did a research on the Internet. The answer was mostly positive. However, none of the information I found on the web didn’t give any hard evidence about the benefit of having a Sitemap.

I had some resistance from our web developer, as they think a website which has already been indexed by Google doesn’t need to submit Sitemap. They insisted that submitting Sitemap of a already indexed website will have nagetive impact on the website’s index. The URLs which are not in the Sitemap won’t be indexed at all. However, considering the number of pages we have on our webiste and been indexed by Google, I firmly believed that submiting Sitemap can bring some benefit to our websites’ index.

Our company has five different webistes. Gemondo is the biggest one which has more than 5,000 jewellery items listed on it. marcasites.co.uk, celticandcladdagh.co.uk, stijlstyle.com and 24karatpuredevotion.com are much smaller websites in terms of item number and page number. I used a free Sitemap generator GSiteCrawler to create Sitemap for my websites. This is particular good for generating Sitemap for big webiste with tens of thousand of pages.

I keeping on tracking the number of pages indexed through Webmaster Tools after I submit the Sitemap to Google. I can see a significant increase in the number of pages indexed one month after I submit the Sitemap.

http://www.stijlstyle.com indexed page number

celticandcladdagh.co.uk indexed page number

marcasites.co.uk indexed page number

http://www.24karatpuredevotion.com indexed page number

From the above statistics we can see that indexed page number increased sharply after submission. Although there’s downward trend after the sharp growth, overall the indexed page number is still a lot more than before.

Therefore, I can draw the conclusion that submitting Sitemap can definitely increase the indexed page number on Google. Some say that this is extremely good for new websites.

I didn’t include the result for Gemondo.com, since I’m still having problem with submitting the Sitemap to Webmaster tools. I will post the result on my blog when it become successful.

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Google.co.uk or Google.com

What’s the worst thing a SEOer can encounter? A significant decrease of the keywords ranking on major search engines over night. Luckily enough, I’ve been through this major drop this morning, although at last it turned to be a false alarm.

I was looking through the statistics of our company’s website Gemondo.com on Google Webmaster Tools this morning. I clicked on some of  our web site’s keywords on the Google top quires page to monitor their performance on SERPs. However, the result turned out to be a tremendous shock to me. For some of the chosen keywords of our company, I cannot find our website on the first page, and not even on the second and third page. Most of the keywords rankings have dropped at least two pages.

I was absolutely astonished by the result. It’s two days before the Christmas Day. We have been adding content to our website, the traffic is quite significant and the Alexa ranking is increasing for the recent months. There’s no sign of PR fall, neither is backward link number. Everything seems all right.

After a thorough diagnosis, the only thing I can find is that the number of pages been indexed by Google dropped around 40%. There are some 3,600 URLs aren’t followed due to the redirect errors. These pages aren’t indexed by Google, hence reduced the number of internal links.

I really cannot believe that Google can take all my hard work away over night. If the search result can be so much unpredictable and dynamic, what’s the sense of have the SEO industry then.

My thought at that time was to double check on Google before turning to the big guys on the web for help. Next thing I did is to go to Google.com like billions of  other webusers do everyday, and type in my keywords to check teh SERP. Oops, our website is still showing on the first pages. What the hell! Do they change the search result every minute?

I was confused, totall confused. I turned to my colleague Andrew.  He came over to my PC as I explained what did I encounter. “One is Google.com the other one is Google.co.uk”, he said so after a quick glance on my monitor.

What a fool I was. Of course the search result various in Google.com and Google.co.uk. Everytime when I type Google.com, it gets redirected to Google.co.uk. Whereas on Webmaster Tools’s top enquiries page, each keyword links to Google.com.

Google SERP

Victor Decided to start blogging

Three days before the Christmas day of 2008, I finally decided to start blogging.

Since I got my job as a SEOer in Gemondo.com, I’ve been going through a lot of blogs everyday. One of my favourite blogs is SEO Book by Aaron Wall. It’s indeed a good SEO blog which helps a lot in my career. It was Aaron’s article How to start writing which ultimately gave me the idea of starting write my own blog.

Before I read the article, I was always thinking I should not start blogging unless I have got something extraordinary to write about, or maybe I should wait until my English becoming much better. However, Aaron’s remark, there is only one way to learn how to write well and that is to write often,  really woke me up. Right, it’s the time to start now.

Like said, fail to plan is plan to fail. Before actually start, I should absolutely have a plan. So what to expect in my blog?

Firstly, I will try to put my everyday SEO practice in my blog, to record my every step of my career as a professional SEOer. Although I this is my first job after my master’s degree in the University of Warwick, I’m confident that as time goes by, my SEO still will keep on developing.

Secondly, I’d like to share my hobbies in this blog, such as photography and sports.

Last but not least, I will also use this blog to record my life in the UK. Life is not easy when you live and work abroad. Sometimes, it’s inevitable to feel a little bit down, therefore, a place to reveal my feelings is requires.

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